Human nature, red in tooth and claw

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About Tess

Liverpool lass Tess is now settled in the far north of England where she roams the fells with a brolly, dreaming up new stories and startling the occasional sheep. You can follow her ramblings at her website, www.tessmakovesky.com.

Dull but necessary

Attack of the killer… sprinkles?

Depending on your point of view, this is either hilarious or worrying. Hilarious because someone actually dialled 999 (the emergency police/ambulance/fire number in the UK, in case you didn’t know) to report that her ice cream only had sprinkles on one side and the vendor wouldn’t give her her money back.

Yes. Really. You couldn’t make it up. To make it even better, when she was challenged she still maintained it was “a little bit of an emergency”, which is like saying someone is a little bit pregnant.

What’s more worrying is that calls like hers tie up the emergency services and prevent other, genuinely needy people getting through. The emergency services regularly release stories like this one to try to get the message across, and it’s reported in the press, on tv, online, in magazines, on social media and just about everywhere else you can think of. And yet, still the idiots keep on phoning… to report family rows, missing pets, wrong weather forecasts, whether there’s a chicken crossing the road (that one really happened, too, at Christmas, only that was at least a ‘genuine’ hoax). As one of my friends said, there’s no legislation against stupidity, but you do have to despair.

Oh, and if you want to read the sprinkles story (if only to prove I wasn’t making it up) you can find it on the BBC website here. I’m amused to see it happened in Birmingham, like so many other strange or hare-brained things I report on here. I hesitate to say it’s a stupid city, but…

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3 thoughts on “Attack of the killer… sprinkles?”

What a story, Tess! I’ve actually read of things like that happening here, too. I’ve heard for instance of people calling the emergency number because they had a problem with their order in a restaurant. It is indeed scary when you think of someone who may genuinely need emergency assistance. And it makes me think about the self-involvement of people who think ‘not enough sprinkles for my taste’ constitutes an emergency…